#cllgood

[prvtocol]

Marion Cotillard and Eva Green are PERFECT fcs for Bri and Vez because they legit look like they could be sisters!!!!! omg

aww ty! 💛 i thought so too. this image below isn’t mine but the similarities are really there. i have them as half-sister but even sisters could fit. 

[immobiliter]

Black Sails rewatch Black Sails rewatch Black Sails rewatch Black Sails rewatch

BLACK SAILS REWATCH!!!!!!!

[darlingdeadest]

@cllgood asked: I was always told that you were the one without fear. Was I misinformed?

Time’s stretched, now. Time’s the film between the lungs and ribs. Elevated. From the ceiling. If he thinks (thinks?) too long he sees himself like dust. Hard to pinpoint. Reflecting light. Fractals. Fractured. He can catch the stream sometimes and then his hand’s pale in bright water, and the sunlight is the sunlight of the bayou. The chatter – first cicadas in summer Louisiana heat (sweetest honey-tea) then Hiss then the babble of the employees, all mixed up in his head like a love letter – propagates against what used to be his spine, and now’s a field. There’s no toes to curl. There’s no skin to crawl. 

Be. To not-be. To be to be to be not-being. Do-be-do-be-do. 

He’s not anything now when he’s still himself and something more. He’s blue (ainthesetearsintheseyestellingyou) and there is danger, danger here! it’s dangerous to go alone sears, white hot, in the disarray that were retinas once implanted in the eyeball deep. So much for curbing archetypes for the sake of the stability of the Bureau. He has no hands to hold them back with and the hands he has are busy drawing water from the drying well amongst the five pillars of Slidescape 36, this here-now that tastes of marigolds, and the thoughts, all thoughts, have opened an impossibility of being. 

He chose Hedron. It chose him too, and the Bureau is nebulous, blue, curling in the skylight of his consciousness like endless smoke. He never smoked, it was bad for the lungs, bad for his cardio, but Trench smoked all the time and the ashtray protected that habit from not blossoming rancid. Beyond that crooked hallway the downfall, and deeper still the reckoning become salvation. He knew it now. He saw it now: the Oldest House yawned wide, pregnant with the horror and its beauty. The fractals inside his skull have opened, splitting the bone to blossom flowers between the fissures. In the eye inside of him he sees (t)Trench(es) smoking with the aftermath of ruination. If he tries to call out to the thing he knew he was before he cannot even if he sees it across the expanse of himself. 

Time unfolded before him. And he found that he was fibre with the Oldest House. That Hedron had welcomed him and in that opening he had enmeshed himself forever with the concrete that had been his family. Pillars of steel. The humming of the ancient technology. All of it, inside of him, now. He is in the air. He is in the projectors. It is because the new Director is part of it, too, carries Polaris, a kernel of hope inside her that Hedron harmonises with. If he reaches he can almost touch his own cheek and remember the shapes to be human. But fully, truly, he is not Casper Darling anymore. He is the echo of him, the ghost bird drawn from the fibres of his memories. If he were to meet himself in full he would not recognise himself. He has seen what lies beneath the Abyss. He has seen the winding stairways of the Tower. He has come, full circle, ἄλφα καί ὦ μέγα, (I AM WHAT I AM) and he has become beyond the confines of his flesh. But for all his knowledge now that has phagocytized him, the edges are brittle just the same even though Hedron holds him tightly. Because where the Hiss cannot enter, Mister Door can slip his blackened fingernails between fissures to pry open like shells and drink the sweetness he finds there.

And for the first time since he has become More Than He Was, the-entity-that-has-been Casper Darling is afraid. 

[orphidian]

@cllgood: "𝙵𝙾𝚁 𝙻𝙾𝚅𝙴'𝚂 𝙴𝚅𝙴𝚁 𝙱𝙴𝙴𝙽 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙼𝙾𝚁𝙴 𝙳𝙴𝚂𝚃𝚁𝚄𝙲𝚃𝙸𝚅𝙴 𝚆𝙴𝙰𝙿𝙾𝙽, 𝚂𝚄𝚁𝙴."  /  dark tower. 

She had left the king to brood on her prophecies by the fire some hours ago; there he still sat, and she could feel the inexorable grind of his thoughts from here. Pragmatic, stolid, blunt. The shade of Orin wondered briefly if her words might change anything, or—as any prophecy had the right to—lead him down that path regardless. In spite of. Or because of. She let the thought amuse her, a half smile curling pale, cracked lips; elsewise it would only torment her. 

Next came the other ‘slinger. Second half of the king with no crown, the king with no kingdom. And she spoke softly to him, barely within the reach of the firelight, half within the shadows that would soon ensnare this laughing boy. 

“Bright boy that you are. You will die for love. But you will kill for it too.”

She wouldn’t mince her words. Over his shoulder lit by the fire she could see the face of his father, his mother, his sisters, the line of his ancestors stretching back and back. But her hand reached up, cold, cold, a rests against his stubbled cheek. Eyes near as pale as her lips crinkled with a true smile. 

“For love’s ever been the more destructive weapon, sure.” He answered with a matching smile, as if she had not just writ his coming death for him. Mayhaps he didn’t believe her. That was okay, she thought. He believes in him. That’s all that’s needed. 

“Love, or the lack of it,” the oracle answered, hand dropping away. She could see his face too now, swimming over the shoulder touched by the darkness of the world outside. Walter’s smile was not the warm one they shared; it was madness and cruelty incarnate. Her own faded away. 

“There is only one man I have met who cannot love. Not a man—poor desolate creature. His hate might match your love Cuthbert Allgood. Don’t let it.”

[charyka]

MURDER BALLADS OF 1816. | ACCEPTING.

@cllgood​. | farson said: O ye sons of men, now a city shines!

He had grown drunk with the screams. They grew like fire grows to envelope the wind: they grew with terrible heat and unforgiving swiftness. In the bowels of the city, and in its streets and gilded carcasses. They had not spared any of them. There had been no mercy to drown any babes in. Death had come: it had swept through the cobblestones and metal. It had devoured.

Devouring was what it knew best, after all.

But with every drunkenness then came the boredom. That wet, yawning beast, that coiled out of his inner chest to stretch, an ugly cat for an uglier heart, that he nursed with genocide and horror wherever, whenever needed.

He grew bored so often. It was always a question of time, of trickling violent time, inconsequential to him when it turned so shallow so easily, and without much thought. He killed a world and then moved on and then got bored with the next and the next and the next. And in those teeth boredom was a dangerous thing.

He stands from the rubble he was sitting on, licking sticky sweetness of blood off his fingers. Someone moans by his feet, disfigured by a cleaving blow that's split the face, tongue to eye. The flesh with a gaze and three quarters tugs on the edge of his boots and again makes a noise that must have been human speech before most of the tongue was lost. Under the blood and the soot, the colour of a city guard uniform crumpled inside an open wound along the spine. Rudin Filaro looks down at the thing that was human before and lifts his foot.

The skull caves and makes a noise: a branch split by the cold. He wipes the blood and brains off the heel of his boots in the dirt, like getting rid of shit stuck to the bottom of them.

He walks slowly with his hands in his pockets and ambles upwards towards the citadel turning red in the fire and sunset. What's left of the city has charred itself to the bones of the hill: he picks at it with delight, leaves the tender morsels for last, licks his fingers clean of the sweet juices of despair, of rot, of the slow sluggish stench of burned human flesh. Sweeter than any pork roast the useless cook Hax could have dreamt of.

The beamquake tore through the orchards and the winding road that leads to the heart of the citadel: the handiwork of chaos reverberating through the skull of the world in jubilant bell tolls. Jubilant. Bludgeoning.

He wants to walk the streets he walked as Marten o' the Broadcloak. Walk them and know them for the filth they are. Walk them with all the rot exposed, and the dead bodies festooning the marrow that's leaking. Walking's what he does best.

He's the Walkin' Dude.

The crows peck at the eyes of a deadchild. He feels the jelly leak down his chin and breathes deep the barrier between him and the birds that grows dim. Perhaps he'll fly just a little: drink it all in to make the head spin.

What use is all the hard work if you can't bask in the fruits of your labor?

He leaves his Shape with the crack, the sound of blood broken and bone: the boots to claws, the face elongated beyond recognition, and the form that grows small and the eyes beady.

The hot wind lifts him up. Above the spires and the spine of the quake and the overturned hierarchies. He sees men take great fistfuls of silks and of gold in their hands and stain them red. Women gorge themselves on sweet cakes and honey, more food than they could ever see alive. He sees them drag the courtiers by the hair in the mud and the little boy catatonic by the body of his decapitated brother. He sees the barracks quartered and the children in them slaughtered. He sees the threaded horses butchered to make meat for the feast tonight. He sees it all, and his cawing is a laugh.

His heels hit the cobblestone of the inner courtyard. Edoacer Grissom, who was cleaning a sledgehammer, winces at the unannounced arrival.

"I hate it when you do that, char-walker. It gives me the heebie-jeebies."

He does not dignify that with an answer. 

“Who’s this?”

“This?”

Grissom bends down to lift the woman lying by his feet up to her knees so Rudin can see her. The right side of her face is puffy, her eye reduced to a slit. Her dark hair sticks to her forehead: not by sweat but by blood. She’s gagged, she’s bound, and the ropes have left deep red indents on her cheeks and wrists. Grissom shakes her by the shoulder, to punctuate the words:

“This, be an old friend of yours. Rosalie James.”

His hands are back in his pockets. He walks with his long legs to the doors of what was once the House of Deschain (one torn off its hinges, one crooked, burned) and picks up an apple that had rolled to the ground dropped by a dead hand. He bites into it: its sweetness forbidden to him.

"Big Man's upstairs in the office, if you're looking for him," Grissom says, hands still in Rose’s hair. 

"And the brat?"

"Gone. By now they'll have lost our trackers, sure as the day is long and Gilead shines.”

Rudin spits on the cracked tile floor. Half-chewed apple. He takes a second bite and swallows this one.

“Gilead ain’t shining no more.”

He says it softly. With not much shape to the words that he speaks. 

“Shall I bring the girl, then?”

“Yes,” Rudin squares her up and down, and remembers the times they played Castles together, “I’m sure we’ve such sights to show her.”

Grissom smiles and shoves the hammer into his belt. On this they can always agree, he and the necromancer: on the carnage.

Rose tries to fight him, but with her broken shoulder and the traces of his hammer having shattered her leg in three different pieces, there’s not much fighting she can do. He grabs her by the hair to follow him up the right staircase that meets the one on the left in the middle and then turns upwards to the second floor. The white-painted walls of the hallway are splattered red: a great wave. The light comes through the thin tall windows all wrong, drowned in crimson. As they pass Rudin taps the eye-shaped stain with two knuckles, three times, meets the old friend halfway down to Hell. 

They walk up the hallway, Rose stumbling behind them with her wounded leg gushing blood. The door to what was the Deschain’s office was torn off its hinges. Edovacar Grissom and one of his men lean on the wall beside it, though they quickly stand when Edoacer and Filaro walk up to them. 

John Farson sits at the desk, with his feet on the desk, with his hands behind his head. At the great ancient mahogany desk of the king he had sworn to destroy he takes stock of this victory. 

The body has not been moved. The eyes have not been closed.

He stands when his right and left hand enter and grins that sick rotten grin of his. Grissom pushes Rose to the floor again. She falls with a thud. She refuses to look at Farson or at the body. Her breathing presses her ribs to her muscle, muscle to her skin: the trapped rabbit of her heart unconcealed.

Rudin walks to the body. He presses his boot to the face and moves the head with it. Peers at the pale blue emptied of fire and the chin splattered with drying blood.

Farson hunkers down beside Rose, pulled back up by Grissom and held in place with the handle of the hammer across her throat. She tries to stop herself from wincing but cannot, with him so close, with Josiah dead, with Roland gone, with the city drowning, in ruins. 

"Ain't that your dinh, girl? Ain't he the father of your flock?"

In the cadence of his speech all of the preacher's son he'd been to learn to become god to the men he commands. Behind her, Grissom snickers.  When she opens her eyes again all fear is gone from that dark iris and instead lies only a cold hate she does not bother hiding with nothing else left in the world. She spits past her gag and most of it drips down her chin. But some of it lands on Farson’s face. 

He blinks too slowly.

"Have it your way, then."

Filaro moves aside. Farson’s intention in the air hanging heavy, unbearable. Rudin takes a dagger from inside his black coat and hands it to him. Rose's eyes widen. If she could move her head she would shake it. Frantic. Frantically. She can only swallow against the wooden handle and have it hurt. Past the rope that gags her a pleading NO NO NO NO NO NO staring straight in the headlights. A begging. Muffled but no less desperate. 

“I’ll leave the heart for you, Filaro.”

“No need. I devoured it long ago.”

The knife is not made to cut through sinew or windpipe let alone bone. It takes longer than anything sane should: but sanity has deserted Gilead and all that’s left of her is dying. Breathing so slowly, bellowing, wheezing, left in the road with the truck that hit it nowhere to be seen.

John Farson turns with his sleeves bloodied and his hands bloodied and the front of his shirt covered in blood. He holds Steven Deschain’s head by the hair. He wipes his face with the back of his hand, leaves red in its wake. The head hits the desk with a low thud. Farson frowns and spits.

“Will you shut that bitch up, Edoacer?”

“With pleasure, Gilead-dinh.”

She screams at the affront of the Tongue in Grissom’s mouth almost louder than she screamed as Farson decapitated the corpse of her king. But then the screaming stops mid-way, and all that heralds her silence is a wet thunk. Farson grins and opens his arms as Rose's blood pools crimson-red and her body falls still with spasming wheezes. The brain feels no pain, nor can it feel the hot air that wafts upwards from the burning city. It can feel its broken skull, however, shattered barrier between a world of here and a world of simple dark, and she is blind, now, and she is frail dancing in the wind like paper cranes. The second hammerfall breaks the brain, too. 

She dies sometime between the third and fourth.

The quiet then returns, on the surface of the bloody chaos below them, in the city. With his stained mouth and red hands, Farson throws his head back to laugh a howl. Filaro watches the blood pool stop inching along the floor and then looks up to John Farson and his grin, his heaving chest, his eyes wild with triumph.  

"O ye sons of men, how a city shines!"

Filaro blinks slowly, at that. “A pity,” he says. “She may have been able to tell us where the brat and his mutts went.”

Farson’s expression crumbles. It moves jaggedly, like an animal lost in the woods it thought it knew, and he furrows his brow and looks down at the dead woman and then back at the wizard his advisor. Something that he always took as covenant now lies twisted upside-down inside his head, a splinter shoved between his pride and his authority. Steven Deschain stares expressionless and glassy-eyed. Edoacer Grissom leans against his hammer. His face is flecked with red: bone, brain matter, blood. He swallows hard and wants to wring the magis’ rotten neck for that calm, lifeless gaze. Filaro stares back, in his eyes all the knowledge that he needs. He will not. He will never dare.

Rudin o’ The Roads has killed men for less.

“Edovacar!” Grissom calls instead over his shoulder, and his son promptly appears in the doorway. Grissom gestures at the bodies on the ground with the mallet, “Take care of this mess.”

Filaro moves to let him and his man pass and reach what’s left of Steven Deschain. Farson seems deep in thought, still looking at Rose’s remains as they carry out Steven's first. The head is momentarily forgotten. Until it is remembered, the rot of a toothache, the throb of a dying molar, and Farson grabs it by the hair again.

“Grissom?”

“Yes?”

“Tell your men to fetch Johns’ head, too. And Allgood’s.”

"Allgood's been buried."

"Then break the fucking crypt if you have to! Get them to me! Now!"

He glares at Filaro after Edoacer scurries off.

Filaro says nothing but watches. Always watches. Always with eyes of the dead. Edovacar returns for Rose's body. Farson clenches his jaw and breaks the gaze. He licks his lips. The severed head trembles lightly in his grip.

"Tomorrow we meet to discuss the hunt for the Deschain brat. Tonight, enjoy the festivities."

He almost mumbles. He can barely bring himself to look Filaro in the eye. Farson does not have the intelligence to fully understand, but he can at least discern that tonight with one sentence Rudin Filaro has begun to claim something that was always his: power. Filaro extends a hand for Farson to return his dagger and Farson does. The feeling is sudden and clammy and unbearable, the thought that comes with it even more so. That he has been used. That all he has done, all the great acts of violence perpetuated by John Farson, all the terror and the fury, was nothing but in service of some greater power he cannot understand nor see nor ever be privy to. It comes now, in great waves. More terrible. Much worse. If he looks too long in Filaro's eyes he can catch glimpses of it: bloodied and sharp and agonising and carved into the flesh of the world like a thin blade, like a needle to the wound that's not been cauterized. It gnaws at him, because it wants, too, it wants and wants so bottomless and red.

He hands the dagger and he walks out. He takes the seat of Steven Deschain's soul with him.

Now in the quiet, with blood new and old seeping into the wood, R. F. of great and many names inhales. Drinks in agony and rust. Exhales. Makes power of black violence and terror.

His laughter is not a sound the human consciousness should hear. One of Farson's men hears it as he passes by the open office door.

Then he takes the knife in his boot and he slashes his own throat, but the sound continues, continues, in him and his mind and the blood as it gushes, a laughter from the teeth and the throat of the dead.

[morghulis]

@cllgood: 𝙸 𝙷𝙴𝙰𝚁𝙳 𝚈𝙾𝚄 𝙲𝙰𝚁𝙴 𝚅𝙴𝚁𝚈 𝙼𝚄𝙲𝙷 𝙰𝙱𝙾𝚄𝚃 𝚁𝙸𝙶𝙷𝚃 𝙰𝙽𝙳 𝚆𝚁𝙾𝙽𝙶, 𝙰𝙽𝙳 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙳𝙴𝙻𝙸𝚅𝙴𝚁𝚈 𝙾𝙵 𝙹𝚄𝚂𝚃𝙸𝙲𝙴 𝚃𝙾 𝚃𝙷𝙾𝚂𝙴 𝚆𝙷𝙾 𝙳𝙴𝚂𝙴𝚁𝚅𝙴 𝙸𝚃. / a man with no name.

She’d spent most of the past two days curled up in a hard wooden chair beside Jon’s bed, watching the nurses and De Curry through bloodshot eyes, narrowed with ill-concealed suspicion. Mostly they ignored her presence as if she were naught but another bit of furniture and went about their good work. Some huffed at her; others smiled, and left her glasses of water or milk sweetened with honey, a bowl of sunflower seeds to nibble on. De Curry gave her work to do from time to time.

“Prop his head up, tip some honeyed water past his lips.”

“Cool his brow with a wet towel.”

“Peek under his bandages, tell me if you see any swelling, green pus, fresh bleeding, the like.”

Arya appreciated that the most. Something for her to do besides gnaw her nails to nubs and stare at her brother’s sickly pale face. At one point she’d washed and combed his hair for him, untangling the knots by hand and carefully plaiting it afterwards. He looked a little more alive after that, she thought, and went back to her wooden plinth of a seat.

Alain visited on the second day, raising a hand to curb her questions when her hard eyes fell upon him. “You know I don’t have answers for you.” And she did, though her mouth had opened to ask her questions nonetheless. He sat beside her and passed her a pouch full of thin strips of lean beef which she chewed in sullen, grateful silence. When he put his hand on top of Jon’s she stilled, as if somehow that would lift this long sleep and heal all of his wounds. As if Alain’s Touch worked in such a way, though she knew it didn’t. That only happened in the old stories. After a short while he sat back and sighed gently.

“Does he dream?” Her voice was so soft it almost came out a whisper.

Alain took his time in answering, as he always seemed to do, and for once Arya did not itch with impatience but with dread. “Aye,” he finally answered, just as softly.

Something loosened inside of her, a tension that had kept her taut as a trip line. She nodded and did not ask for more. An hour passed before Alain took his leave, tipping his hat to Arya as he went.

Then came Cuthbert, who spoke first to the good Doctor in a low voice that Arya didn’t bother to try to make out before coming to her. Something about his presence angered her where Alain’s had not, frustration ticking within her like a bomb. When he laid his hand on her shoulder as he had done so many times in the past she nearly hissed, and the sound of her slapping his hand away rang loudly within the quiet healing hall. If that action hurt him, whether body or heart, he showed none of it in his face as he sat across from her on the edge of Jon’s bed.

An odd thing happened then, as she stared at him with hard and furious eyes: they flickered briefly, the pupils of them burnished gold for but half a second. There and gone, between blinks. And again, if Cuthbert noticed he did not show it.

You’re angry with me. I ken it, his look seemed to say. As well she should be to her mind. He’d told her little and less that cold and bloody night, and so earned her wrath, unfairly or not. For all that Arya Stark believed herself to have little in common with her mother, she still had all the trappings of her cold fury, the depth of her empathy lined with sharp teeth.

When he reached for her hand she did not pull away, instead gripping his wrist so tight her nails dug into his skin. He ignored that too, or bore it gladly by the way his mouth twisted into a smile darker than any she’d seen on Cuthbert Allgood’s face before.

“I heard you care very much about right and wrong, and the delivery of justice to those who deserve it,” he said with quiet certainty, that smile never fading. Arya’s free hand came down upon his then, and he added his free one too, the pair of them gripping each other tight.

“I may not be a gunslinger,” she answered, grey eyes burning. “But I’m still a wolf, and I have teeth enough. Show me a throat, Allgood.”

[aglaecan]

@cllgood asked: A reputation won’t keep you alive. / haaaawke ||  ( Privilege of Peace sentences || Accepting )

-----------------------------

Hawke looks up from where she’s running the sharpen-stone along her blade. Her guns are laid out beside her, her gunna neat and ready. She’s a veteran of this life and he a novice, but trained, yes. They’re a-traveling, they two, the older ‘slinger and the young. Ka-mai, the both of them, and wild and fey with it they are. Hawke’s lady-sai despairs and loves in the same breath her bright ka-mai lover; and neither’d have the other any which way but this.

“Think’e so?” she asks the youngling. “And aye, it’s true enough, so far as it goes. Won’t save ye from the muties, nor any other brainless thing. Won’t keep ye from disease nor age; a bullet can still find ye, say true.” She reaches out to touch her fingers to the old warm wood of the gun’s stock at her side, a charm, a token, her own little touch o’glammer. Good luck, say true.

“But there’s them as will hesitate. Them as thinks on choice an’ consequence. Base cunning it is, as I reckon it; not true strength o’mind nor will. But even a second’s breath of pause’s enough for one of us, trained and true. And that second’s breath of pause a name and a rep can give can save a life.”

[polupenthes]

@cllgood​ asked: What's the story behind the (double) names of the Albion characters, e.g. Medrawt vs. Matugenus? When is which name used?

The answer is fairly simple. This is what happens when you’re thousands if not hundreds of thousands of of years old. The names Medrawt and Bheur are their true names, the names they were Born with, if you can use “born” for entities that are as much myth and legend as they are skin and bone. And even then, the skin and bone is a glamour, magic shaped to give the appearance of humanity. Over the years they have taken on different names as they saw fit. By the end of the period known as Scandinavian Scotland they, like the rest of their kin, had mostly retreated away from all humanity –  Meginbjorn and Brynja were the last names they were known by by non-magic humans.  

Matugenus is a name that was inscribed on a piece of Samian ware pottery found at Hadrian’s wall. Medrawt is the earliest form of Mordred, found in the Annales Cambriae. If you know even a little bit about Mordred’s role in the Arthurian corpus, you can figure out a thing or two about Matugenus’ relationship with his own father (spoiler alert: “complicated”).

Bheur is a reference to an epithet of the folkloristic Cailleach (who she is based on), bheurra, meaning “of winter”. Beira is the anglicised version of that.

Simon has two names because he’s very paranoid, and also just wants to be left alone. Símidh Bhàsa is the name he was born with and registered under at the Academy, and what he was known as while part of the Coven. After he left the Coven and struck up as a professional bounty hunter, he didn’t care much to be recognised, and changed his name to Simon (no last name).